Hangman
by Unhobbity Hobbit
Summary: Sam just doesn't have much luck with things that go for the neck. Limp!Sam.


A/N: This is purely me fulfilling Frankie's wish. Because I'm her bitch or something like that.

Hangman

This was meant to be an easy one. They didn't even have to go into the house, just burn the bones that were in the back yard. Simple! Just maybe a bit of activity when the spirit got wind of they were doing.

But no. Goddamn teenagers and their Goddamn dares. Who the hell agrees to go into a house where seven people have been hanged in the past five years? In fact, it was worse than that; seven teenage girls who had been dared to go in the house had been hanged in the past five years. Sometimes people were so stupid they almost deserved what they had coming to them, and they made Dean and Sam's job so much harder.

"You take upstairs, I'll take downstairs," said Dean. Sam nodded and moved off up the creaky stairs. They didn't really have a hope of being stealthy in this house. The floorboards creaked at every movement and the amount of dust and cobwebs being stirred up was making it very hard not to sneeze. This was pretty much your quintessential haunted house; dark, dank, rotting and with the smell that comes along with those kinds of things. The bushes growing up around the side of the house and brushing against the windows didn't exactly help lighten the atmosphere.

The beam of Dean's flashlight caught the tremble of a cupboard. He moved towards it as quietly as the floorboards would allow and stopped to hear quick, frightened breaths coming from inside the cupboard.

"Misti?" he said and was answered with a whimper. He opened the cupboard and shone his flashlight onto the girl's dirt-streaked face. She was crying and scared and tried to press herself further into the corner but Dean really couldn't be bothered to deal with it. He grabbed her arm and pulled her out. "We'll get you out of here, okay?" was about the most reassuring thing he could come up with as he dragged her to the bottom of the staircase. "Sam!" he called, "Sam, I've got her! Let's get out of here!" he waited for some kind of response but there wasn't one. "Sam?" He let go of Misti's arm and edged up the first few steps. "_Sam!_"

Dean leapt up the stairs two at a time, completely forgetting Misti. At the top of the stairs he turned and his knees almost gave out at what he saw at the end of the hallway. The door at the end of the hall was wide open and in the room, silhouetted against the faint light from the moon was a hanging body. Sam's hanging body. "Sam!" Dean yelled again as he pelted into the room full speed. He took stock of the fact that the spirit was nowhere to be seen as he headed straight for Sam and grabbed onto his legs and lifted him up. Get the pressure off his throat, let him breathe.

_Unless the spirit pulled hard, could have broken his neck, _said a horrible, horrible voice in Dean's head that he pushed far away, somewhere it wouldn't come back and bother him from. He didn't need those thoughts.

The moment Misti entered the room was marked by a shrill scream. "Help me!" said Dean. Misti ran into Dean's line of sight but then stopped, looking upwards with a horrified expression.

"Oh my God, his face!"

"Shut the fuck up and help me!" Dean shifted, trying to get a better grip because Sam was slipping. Sam and slipping were two words Dean did not want anywhere near each other.

"What... how...?"

"Knife! There's a knife in my boot. No, the other one!" Misti pulled out the knife and stared at it, then looked back up at Dean. "Cut the rope!" he yelled, on the verge of getting hysterical, because your only help being a ditsy fifteen-year-old girl was not reassuring.

"I can't... I can't reach-"

"Then get something to stand on!" Dean knew his tone wasn't calming Misti at all but he couldn't help it. He was holding his _possibly already dead brother_, no, he was holding his unconscious brother's full weight and was the only thing keeping him alive. He could feel the burn in his arms as they held tight to Sam's legs, holding him up.

"I can't find anything."

"There's a chair right there!"

"It looks rotten."

"I'm trying to stop my brother from _being hanged_," yelled Dean, leaving the 'I don't care if it's got rusty nails sticking out of it' implied because he was struggling with Sam's weight too much to say it. Misti got the idea and dragged the chair over, stood on it and started sawing through the rope.

When she finally got through it, Sam fell forward in a sickening way, like a rag doll. Misti screamed as Sam tipped forward on top of her, Dean not really having the much control over him and, frankly, he would rather Sam fell on Misti than the hard and unforgiving floor.

Misti rolled Sam off her and onto his back while Dean scrambled up towards Sam's head. Sam's face should never look like that, and it certainly should never be that colour. He quickly loosened the noose and carefully lifted it off over Sam's head. Fuck, those bruises around his neck, it was painful just to look at them.

"Come on Sammy, come on, wake up." But Sam wasn't breathing and no amount of slapping him on the cheeks was going to change that. Misti had passed into hysterical few minutes back and was now blubbering uncontrollably.

"Oh God, oh God, he's dead!"

"No he's fucking not." said Dean viciously. "_Fuck!_" Misti jumped half a foot in the air at Dean's shout and cried harder. Dean got control of himself again; this wasn't the way to wake Sammy up. He tilted Sam's head back, mindful of the bruises and then began to breathe for him.

Sam's eyes shot open. Where the hell was he? What the hell was going on? Why the hell was Dean's mouth fastened over his? Why did his chest hurt? Why did his neck hurt (and Jesus Christ did it hurt)? Just, what the _hell_?

He pushed weakly at Dean, who looked up at him with such happiness in his eyes that Sam knew something really bad must have happened. Sam took his first unaided gasp of air and it felt like it burnt him all the way down into his lungs, like he was trying to breathe razor blades. He shut his eyes against the pain and tried to remember, what could he remember?

They were looking for a teenage girl called Misti. Sam had taken the upstairs while Dean took downstairs and then... then the spirit had attacked. While Sam was peering into a room it had looped something over his head and pulled him violently onto the floor. That explained the tremendous pain in his neck.

Then the spirit had dragged him down the hallway. Sam had tried getting his feet under himself, to relieve some of the pressure on his throat so he could at least shout for help but the spirit knew what it was doing and he hadn't got the chance. Then the floor had left him all together. He'd tried to reach the floor, but it had just carried on getting further away.

He'd kicked and struggled, hands going to his throat, trying to loosen the noose. He'd tried to call for his brother but no air could escape, just as he couldn't drag any air into his starving lungs. He'd gone limp as the world had gone black.

But now he was here on the floor, Dean practically crying over him and some girl thanking God over and over.

"Sammy? Sam, you with me?" Sam opened his eyes again and there Dean was still. He opened his mouth but all that came out was a dry croak. Holy shit, he wasn't going to be able to talk for weeks. Instead he moved his hand to grasp Dean's shoulder, just needing the contact to reassure him that this was real. He was safe. "Can you move?" Sam took a few moments to just breathe, relishing the air getting to his lungs even though it still burned all the way down, then he nodded.

Dean hefted him up to his feet, draping his arm over his shoulders for support. The girl, Misti he now realised, came up on his other side and tried to take as much weight as she could, which wasn't much but he appreciated it.

"I am gonna enjoy burning this son of a bitch," said Dean.

The End.

Hope you enjoyed it!


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